The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but provided by the invention. Some such contributions of the invention may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context.
A heterogeneous network typically comprises different types of base station nodes. As an example, such a network may comprise macro-(e)NodeBs and pico-(e)NodeBs. When a user device is in the coverage area of both a larger umbrella cell and a small cell, it may be beneficial in some cases to exploit both network layers for transmission to the user device. In such a case, a data stream is split to be transmitted via both the umbrella cell node and the small cell node on separate component carriers.